Dr Michael Bassett: Welcome to the current welfare mess

I’m not sure that it’s much comfort to anyone to know that the post-Covid surge in violent crimes, gang activity, ram raids, random shootings, thuggery and stabbings is occurring in other countries as well as New Zealand. These days, wagging school, out-of-control welfare and low-grade parenting by some seem to be fairly universal problems.

Lindsay Mitchell: Labour hid developing welfare crisis

When National became government in 2008, Finance Minister Bill English's determination to understand the extent of benefit-dependency led them to commission Taylor Fry to produce annual actuarial reports. These were duly published at the MSD website every year but ceased when the government changed in 2017. Now however, an Official Information request by the NZ Herald has revealed that the reports actually continued - only their publication ceased.

In my columns I have referred repeatedly to the worsening depth of dependency using the sole measure available - one solitary statistic published in MSD's annual reports not typically subject to public scrutiny.